Monday, November 16, 2009

The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online is frequently updated, and is maintained by the United States Department of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The site offers over 1000 tables of data from over 100 sources. An interesting and multi-perspective approach to measuring the level of crime can be found in section number three, which is titled "Crime, Victims", and it resides on the left hand side of the homepage. It offers statistics about the frequency of various crimes by presenting data from victimization surveys, and officially recorded offenses. Visitors interested in printing the text, tables, or both, of each section, can download them via a link in each section that immediately precedes the list of the topics of that section. The "Archive" link in the menu across the top of the page, allows visitors to download complete editions of the Sourcebook, going back to 1994. Each section of the books can be downloaded separately, or the entire book for that year can be downloaded as a zip file.[>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2009. http://scout.wisc.edu/]